Re: What's left over.

Gerald Britton
2002-11-01T15:44:20Z

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 03:25:01PM +0000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The question I have is whether such external hardware is even worth it
> any more for any standard crypto work. With a regular PCI bus
> fundamentally limiting throughput to something like a maximum of 66MB/s
> (copy-in and copy-out, and that's so theoretical that it's not even
> funny - I'd be surprised if RL throughput copying back and forth over a
> PCI bus is more than 25-30MB/s), I suspect that you can do most crypto
> faster on the CPU directly these days.

This may be true of a typical workstation or large server, but your router
may not have such a modern CPU in it. Crypto accelerators are likely a
much bigger win on embedded routers or other small appliances with CPUs such
as the AMD Elan or other 486 to Pentium class processors.

-- Gerald